Batya Medad – Wild-Eyed Hilltop Jewish Jihad in Shiloh, Palestine

Hasbara News Club – By Michael Hess. In the most obvious and odious way, on a Web site that has the temerity to claim that it is the Jewish Press, Batya Medad is committing incitement to genocide of the Palestinian people by denying their very existence starting with the troubling headline itself, “Palestine: Fictional Country/People”, while at the same time and over decades since 1981, for thirty-five years, being actively involved in displacing Palestinians from their land right now outside of Batya Medad’s front door, at an illegal colony in the Shiloh settlement corridor in the state of Palestine.

I intend for her to not get away with her lies, incitement and historical revisionism. I left the following angry comment after I learned of her hateful and inciteful article on Tuesday to her deplorable musings on the “Jewish Press” Web site, because as she said she closed the comments on the original article over at Shiloh Musings when people began noticing that she clearly has a screw loose, and I fully expect she will delete my comment at “Jewish Press” to the above article as well. [It is still there on 2016-06-04.]:

I am encouraging this Web site to be included in the ongoing investigation of the Palestine “situation” by the International Criminal Court for engaging in the crime against humanity of incitement to genocide through the media.

This type of hate site should be removed from the Web, and those like Batya who lie about the existence of Palestine and the Palestinians must face criminal charges at the Hague for incitement to genocide.

This type of hate speech is causing the terrorism, it is causing antisemitism, and American Jews must get shut of these willfully ignorant, violent fundamentalist extremists like Batya who are no different than Islamic State or Osama Bin Laden.

For shame, the disgrace you do to those murdered in the Shoah, in trying to bring about another one; but this time Batya believes that it is right and good, as long as it is directed at those she hates, the indigenous Palestinians who under international law had a state twenty-four years before Israel was created under UNGA 181.

UN Palestine partition map 1947.

Where do you think Israel was created if not in Palestine as Arthur Balfour pointed out in 1917?

It is criminal, and it is nutty. I know it is insane because of the disclaimer above [“Jewish Press”] comments:

“If you promote any foreign religions, gods or messiahs, lies about Israel, anti-Semitism, or advocate violence (except against terrorists), your permission to comment may be revoked.”

This is terrorist fundamentalism claimed to be done in the name of the world’s Jews. It is despicable, it is illegal, and this hate site should be shut down as the incitement to genocide in the media that it clearly is. The extremist right-wing audience that Batya writes for believes that all 6.3 million Palestinians currently within both the borders of Israel and Palestine are all terrorists.

It is the most vile form of antisemitism when Batya implies that Jews as a people support the crimes against humanity of illegally transferring hundreds of thousands of illegal colonists over the border into the state of Palestine, contrary to Article 49 (6) of the 4th Geneva Conventions, or they are not good Jews.

It is a blood libel to claim that this is all a vast Jewish conspiracy of all Jews, in lockstep march to illegally colonize another country, Palestine, recognized by 138 nations and the Vatican, using state terror and military force.

The types of blood libels thrown around as Batya does here encourage antisemitism, and they encourage people to think that Israel is no different than any other despotic regime in the Middle East – however, a ‘beacon of light’ does not engage in ethnic cleansing and terrorism.

People like Batya are the most dangerous kind of religious violent extremists, and it is time for Web sites like this, and individuals like Batya, to face criminal charges for incitement to genocide of the Palestinian people.

This comment will be “disappeared” as so many are here contrary to Batya’s lies. But it will live on elsewhere because I am posting it to Facebook, BBSNews and The Intercept and elsewhere so others will understand what kind of vile horrendous extremists such as Batya Medad are speaking in the name of the Jews.

This hate site could be just as easily [be] Islamic State, just change a few names here and there and there’s not a dime’s worth of difference. Don’t let her speak for you. She speaks only for pure criminal evil.

She does not speak for all Jews and anecdotally out of hundreds I have never met any Jews who this type of person would be speaking for, maybe it’s something in the water. I just don’t care to know an OG wild-eyed crazed hilltop “settler” (illegal colonist). She speaks hate like Islamic State and other lawless violent religious extremists, and for herself. She is a prime example of how and why extremism on both sides is growing, she is a perfect illustration of what is tragically wrong with the debate, and there is hardly a better object lesson of just how insidious realJew against Jew antisemitism is becoming.

Batya Medad, illegal Israeli colonist who advocates genocide.

Batya Medad personifies the most vile auto-anti-semitism, the false belief that all Jews are in some lockstep conspiracy to commit virtual genocide against an entire people, the Palestinian people, who even Ze’ev Jabotinsky recognized as a “nation” in 1923. I firmly believe that it is time to hold real autoantisemitic extremists such as Batya responsible for the criminal actions that they work so hard to incite.

The partition resolution of November 29th, 1947 [UNGAR 181] itself was underpinned by history with the Palestinians going back to the 1915-16 Mcmahon-Hussein correspondence and forward several years to the couple of months prior to the Palestine Mandate, Winston Churchill, in answer to Palestinians who were terrified that their nation was on the verge of being stolen from them by Zionists, wrote in the British White Paper of 1922 the following:

The tension which has prevailed from time to time in Palestine is mainly due to apprehensions, which are entertained both by sections of the Arab and by sections of the Jewish population. These apprehensions, so far as the Arabs are concerned are partly based upon exaggerated interpretations of the meaning of the [Balfour] Declaration favouring the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine, made on behalf of His Majesty’s Government on 2nd November, 1917.

Unauthorized statements have been made to the effect that the purpose in view is to create a wholly Jewish Palestine. Phrases have been used such as that Palestine is to become “as Jewish as England is English.” His Majesty’s Government regard any such expectation as impracticable and have no such aim in view. Nor have they at any time contemplated, as appears to be feared by the Arab delegation, the disappearance or the subordination of the Arabic population, language, or culture in Palestine. They would draw attention to the fact that the terms of the Declaration referred to do not contemplate that Palestine as a whole should be converted into a Jewish National Home, but that such a Home should be founded ‘in Palestine.’ In this connection it has been observed with satisfaction that at a meeting of the Zionist Congress, the supreme governing body of the Zionist Organization, held at Carlsbad in September, 1921, a resolution was passed expressing as the official statement of Zionist aims “the determination of the Jewish people to live with the Arab people on terms of unity and mutual respect, and together with them to make the common home into a flourishing community, the upbuilding of which may assure to each of its peoples an undisturbed national development.”

It is also necessary to point out that the Zionist Commission in Palestine, now termed the Palestine Zionist Executive, has not desired to possess, and does not possess, any share in the general administration of the country. Nor does the special position assigned to the Zionist Organization in Article IV of the Draft Mandate for Palestine imply any such functions. That special position relates to the measures to be taken in Palestine affecting the Jewish population, and contemplates that the organization may assist in the general development of the country, but does not entitle it to share in any degree in its government.

Further, it is contemplated that the status of all citizens of Palestine in the eyes of the law shall be Palestinian, and it has never been intended that they, or any section of them, should possess any other juridical status. So far as the Jewish population of Palestine are concerned it appears that some among them are apprehensive that His Majesty’s Government may depart from the policy embodied in the Declaration of 1917. It is necessary, therefore, once more to affirm that these fears are unfounded, and that that Declaration, re affirmed by the Conference of the Principle Allied Powers at San Remo and again in the Treaty of Sevres, is not susceptible of change.

During the last two or three generations the Jews have recreated in Palestine a community, now numbering 80,000, of whom about one fourth are farmers or workers upon the land…

Another primary historical document builds on what Churchill had to say about the 80,000 Jews in Palestine at the time of his writing the 1922 Churchill Paper. When he wrote that “the status of all citizens of Palestine shall be Palestinian” there was solid reliable and official census data that tells us the demographic makeup of Palestine at the time, in the Report and General Abstracts of the Census of 1922, Government of Palestine.

J.B. Barron ed Palestine report and general abstracts of the census of 1922 government of Palestine border.

According to the official census data released five months after the 1922 White Paper on October 23rd, 1922, Churchill’s “80,000” number reached 83,694 Yishuv Jews in Palestine [Aviva Halamish 2009] and Palestinians numbered 590,390. Indigenous Palestinians outnumbered Jews seven to one. Given these undeniable facts, it is clear who Churchill was referring to when he wrote, “it is contemplated that the status of all citizens of Palestine in the eyes of the law shall be Palestinian.”

In light of well-known information from scholarly, reliable and undeniable primary documents, Batya Medad is peddling lies that have been debunked by nearly century-old documents by official [British mandate] Palestine government documents and from the British government at Whitehall. It is unconscionable that Medad, using what is clearly extremist religious based historical revisionism, and misinterpreted (by her) “maps” about verifiable history, is inciting genocide and other violence including so-called “price tag” [ADL 2015] attacks on innocent Palestinians, their property and their resources in their own country. She is doing this by denying the fact that Palestinians of course, exist, that there is no such thing as Palestine when Israel was clearly created in it, and that no nation or people existed there until Israel was created, while she is actively involved in the crime at the root of this problem, she is outside of the borders of Israel, over in someone else’s yard, something my five year-old granddaughter can understand. These “price tag” attacks are happening right under her very nose.

After all, since in her extremist view, ‘there is no such thing as a Palestinian or Palestine,’ then it must logically follow that no Palestinian “snake” babies are being burned alive by illegal squatters in Palestine, no, whoops, it happened about three miles from her house.

Included as well in this analysis is the official partition map, accepted by the provisional government of Israel, as represented by Eliahu Epstein, the authorized agent for the nascent Israel, on May 14th, 1948 who wrote the official letter to President Truman and then later eight days later to the United Nations Security Council. This primary map document says clearly in its title, “Palestine, Plan of Partition with Economic Union, proposed by the Ad Hoc Committee on the Palestinian Question.”

Legal Definition of Genocide

Genocide is defined in Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part 1; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

It appears to be incitement to genocide, as in ‘to bring about the destruction of a people as a whole or in part,’ to make the central false claim that Batya Medad has made in the monstrous and appalling screed “Palestine: Fictional Country/People” starting with its very title. Her works in right wing publications reflect this hateful rhetoric regularly. Jerusalem Post and Israel National News, of course “Jewish Press” knows who this woman actually is. With her history as an active illegal colonist in one of the most notorious hotspots deep in the West Bank, not in Israel.

It is a blood libel and antisemitic in the extreme to imply that the crimes being done in her front yard by her neighbors are being done in the name of all the world’s Jews (and whoever swears on a Bible she says), and not instead the repetitious governments in Israel, Labour or Likud, who have all helped these illegal colonies grow outside of Israel since Kfar Etzion was illegally created in 1967, and by these illegal colonists who are committing these crimes, including so-called “price tag” crimes, themselves.

This implies that all Jews are responsible for the ongoing crime against humanity under Article 49 (6) of Geneva 4th. This is antisemitism and a blood libel against the Jewish people. It is a deplorable misuse of the world’s sympathy after the Shoah and by allowing it to continue no healing is possible.

If Batya Medad has the tiniest shred of integrity, after being confronted with the undeniable truth presented here through primary and incontrovertible documents, that not only is what she has written is blatantly false, but also dangerous for Jews in the diaspora, she will end this continuing incitement. Putting this type of incendiary absurdity with no basis in fact online and trying to pass it off as a statement of the Jewish people is inflammatory. Medad should immediately remove this subversive trash and apologize not just to Palestinians who now number 6.3 million in Israel and Palestine, but also to all Jews and right-thinking people everywhere.

She has put lies into the mouths of world Jewry with her repugnant and criminal rhetoric. She needs to be held responsible under Article 25(3)(e) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, take responsibility, and remove this horrible piece of writing, and apologize to her readers and the world for inciting criminal behavior against Palestinians and Jews based upon her false extremist claims about long settled facts in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

A word about Blood Libels

Probably the most widely known blood libel against Jews is the heinous tale of using the blood of children to make Passover matzah. This hideous lie disgusts me even to write it, but write it I must. There are hundreds of other such false horrendous lies in the same disgusting vein that stretch back into antiquity, horrible atrocious things that have led to the most reprehensible crimes known to modern mankind, true antisemitism is a most vile evil.

I absolutely condemn them all just as I heartily condemn human rights crimes being committed right before the world’s eyes that Batya Medad would have them believe, that all Jews are responsible for and participating in.

Benjamin Netanyahu in the last couple of years has made this incendiary charge against Palestinians a couple of times. In 2014 he accused Palestinians of a “wild blood libel” when he charged that “lies” about Al Aqsa being in danger of being dismantled caused a massacre in a Jerusalem synagogue of four worshippers. Netanyahu said that in addition, the initial claims that a Palestinian bus driver was murdered in an Egged bus also contributed to the massacre: “yesterday a bus driver from East Jerusalem committed suicide. The autopsy report proves this beyond a doubt. This didn’t prevent the dissemination of a blood libel that he was murdered by Jews. This incitement contributed to the despicable massacre'”

As with many things that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says, there’s more to the story. While the bus driver was not murdered, it’s not so simple with respect to Al Aqsa. The NGO Terrestrial Jerusalem reported in 2013:

MK Moshe Feiglin reportedly “promised that he will not let Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu alone” until the issue of the right of Jews to pray on the Temple Mount is taken care of, and he reportedly called on other MKs to vote against the government until the demand for Jewish access is met. Earlier in the month, Feiglin called on Jews to “flood the temple mount.” On August 7th, Jews demanding access to the site demonstrated (also here) in front of the Mughrabi Gate (protesting in part the closure of the Temple Mount to Jews during the last two weeks of Ramadan).

On August 4th, Israeli Army Radio revealed that the Israel government is providing funding for the (apparently very well financed) Temple Institute, a far right-wing group whose avowed goal is, “to see Israel rebuild the Holy Temple on Mount Moriah in Jerusalem, in accord with the Biblical commandments.” The group’s website site helpfully shows supporters/visitors what the Temple Mount will (or could) look like “tomorrow’ – a photoshopped picture of the Temple Mount with the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock removed, and replaced by the re-built Jewish temple. On July 6, the Temple Institute released its 2013 Tisha b’Av video, entitled “The Children Are Ready” – making the case that it is time, now, to rebuild the temple (the 2012 video, also entitled “The Children Are Ready,” is available here; for some analysis of both videos, see this report from Open Zion).

The “blood libel” here is not that against the despicable war criminal the former Mufti al Husseini who did in fact in the 1920s and 30s use the claim that the Jewish immigrants to Palestine wanted to take over and destroy the Mosques on the Temple Mount to stir up anti-Jewish riots among the Palestinians whose primary source of public information was what they heard in their mosques. Hussein deserved the hatred he engendered among most Jews. But in creating the lie that Husseini also convinced Hitler to do the Holocaust, Netanyahu then tried to suggest that the Palestinians today who are resisting the Occupation, because they also seek to prevent a Jewish takeover of the Temple Mount (now far more realistic when Jews actually have the power to do so than it was in the 1920s and 1930s) are actually just setting the stage for a new Holocaust. This flagrant misuse of the Holocaust is the “blood libel” against Palestinians. It is a disgrace that he tried to manipulate our feelings of sadness at the murder of 1/3 of our people in the Holocaust to be a reason to distrust or hate the current Palestinians who have nothing to do with Husseini.

Batya Medad claims that it’s all just poor reading comprehension or “careless reading” that has led people to believe that there was a state of Palestine prior to the United Nations Assembly resolution 181 created Jewish national home, the state of Israel, the one that did not exist until May 14th, 1948, created by UNGA 181 which is said to be “irrevocable” in the Israeli declaration of independence.

Mandate period demonstration map of the 1920 period from PBS (WGBH).

When it comes to “careless reading” of maps and basic history, the abominable screed that this analysis is based on is certainly comprised of some “careless reading” on Medad’s part.

She obviously missed that her Boston Public Broadcasting System (WGBH) source of maps contradicts her basic premise. She claims that there was no state of Palestine; however, PBS gets it right when right under the map she tries to use as a proof, the original WGBH caption describes the historical reality at the time, 1920, correctly.

The PBS description of the map says, “In 1919, the British and French implemented the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement and divided the Arab world into nation-states. The League of Nations recognized these borders and allotted “mandates” to the French and British to govern these states until it was determined that they were ready for independence.”

The state of Palestine is right there on the map she tried to use to deny it, look above to the right. The map is quite correct as Palestine was a protected Class-A mandate state twenty-four years before the state of Israel [Quigley 2010] was created under UNGA 181 and held as a “sacred international trust” according to Article 22 (1,4) of the League of Nations Covenant. Indeed, the Palestine Mandate itself says that a Jewish national home was to be created in the country of Palestine, “recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.”

To make matters worse for Batya Medad, the Palestine Mandate incorporates the language from Alfred Balfour’s policy statement on behalf of the British from 1917, “in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” [Emphasis mine.]

Thus Batya utters a blood libel against both peoples. Claiming that there is no Palestine when it clearly existed in modern law twenty-four years before the state of Israel, but all that blood spilled, the deaths from 1860 until now, 91,105 Palestinians, and 24,969 Jews was all because of poor reading comprehension or in her words, “careless reading.” In Batya’s zero sum world, if it turns out that the Palestinians actually exist and have rights as a people, then where does that leave Batya, but most of all where does it leave those Jews that Batya smears when she claims this is done in the name of the Jews?

…yes there were also Arabs here, not too many. That is until Zionism brought economic opportunities for both Jews and Arabs. That’s when many Arabs emigrated from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and further away. And don’t forget that Jordan is also a Twentieth Century invention. Great Britain, contrary to the instructions they were given for the “Palestine Mandate,” gave all of Transjordan, the land east of the Jordan River to the Hashemite Tribe from Saudi Arabia, and they (the Hashemites) have been occupying it ever since.

This idea that all Jews are apparently illiterate and cannot comprehend official census documents and other primary source documents of the time and don’t understand that Israel was created in Palestine; that the deaths on both sides ensuing from Palestinians fighting to keep their homeland was all based on “careless reading” of history is insulting utter poppycock. When the fact is, Palestine was majority Palestinian Muslim/Christian, seven to one, just five years after Arthur Balfour made his policy statement.

Medad’s arrogant claim that:

Ever since the Jewish Kingdoms and People were defeated and banished from this part of the Middle East, there hadn’t been a home-grown independent country here until the Establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. We have returned, and the Land is OURS!!

Is of a parcel with the longstanding fundamentalist Israeli Jew incitement. This type of hate rhetoric implies a blood libel against world Jewry to make these ridiculous untrue claims in the name of the world’s Jews, that the blood having been spilled and still being spilled on both sides is all because of a “careless reading” of history. When it is really a subset of extremist fundamentalist religious ideology that truly resembles those others who wish to establish a religious caliphate, and are willing to kill obviously to do so.

In her parting shot in the article Tuesday morning in Jewish Press when she announced with supreme confidence, “we Jews are unique and holy! Other ancient cultures/peoples are just history.”

I’m not sure that indigenous people all around the world who are living their thousands of years old cultural values still to this day as best they can are going to take to that idea. And I do not believe that the majority of American Jews feel this way, put this way. And it makes a mockery of the 2007 adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, I know that American Indians certainly strongly disagree that we don’t exist or that we are “just history”!

Jewish Antisemitism

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has examined the question of why some Jews, albeit rare in this regard, are anti-Semites or exhibit or participate in antisemitic behavior. In one of their intelligence reports, a feature of SPLC, from 2002 [Daniel Levitas], obviously Bill Gale, the founder of Posse Comitatus, was the first and perhaps one of the most infamous cases of a Jew who fully embraced classical antisemitism and racism.

Another variation of Jewish antisemitism in the same report is described by Sander Gilman, a University of Illinois at Chicago liberal arts professor and the author of Jewish Self-Hatred, who wrote:

“Jews who become genuine anti-Semites do so because of a need to recapture some sense of lost power, and that idea is very much connected to the image of the weak Jew,” Gilman says.

When faced with a barrage of anti-Semitic stereotypes the majority of Jews readily choose to discard the images, says Gilman. But some Jews get caught up in false notions of “good Jews vs. bad Jews,” while others may internalize the stereotypes or even choose to identify with the aggressor.

Examples of Modern Antisemitism

Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group, the state of Israel, or even for acts committed by non-Jews.

In response to the killing of the 21 year-old Palestinian Abdel Fattah al-Sharif who was murdered by an IDF soldier eight or nine minutes after already being shot, one of two assailants suspected of stabbing an IDF soldier, Naftali Bennett, Israel’s Education Minister said in response, “The soldier is not a murderer. Have we lost our minds? We are at war, a war against brutal terrorism.”

How can these types of twisted convictions be reconciled with the diaspora? In this day and age of Donald Trump populism that has brought out from the woodwork some of the most loathsome anti-Semites of the white supremacist variety, it should be self-evident to Americans just how quickly a right wing extremist, racist and populist, xenophobic package of hate can progress from rhetoric to violence. Are all Jews to be held responsible for the words of Israeli leaders who appear most obviously, to vociferously condone an execution in the street of an already wounded alleged assailant?

In a blog post at Jerusalem Post, Medad writes in post headlined, “Yuck! Trump is Like All The Rest! she writes that Trump “has delusions that a ‘solution’ can be brokered/invented/imposed.” She said, “the closer they all get to power, the dumber they get … Here in Israel we need a government that recognizes that we are not like other countries, nor other nations, nor other religions.” Topping Trump’s megalomania is pretty hard, Medad appears to have achieved it.

An illegal squatter, an international criminal, aspires to represent the world’s Jews

At every turn Batya Medad, an illegal squatter who does not live in Israel, who lives in occupied Palestine, shows a haughty arrogance driven by extremist religious ideology that does not represent the world’s Jews any more than Islamic State represents the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims.

Medad lives in Shiloh, an illegal Israeli colony, right smack in between Nablus and Ramallah, deep in the occupied state of Palestine.

Medad and her husband immigrated from Great Neck, New York, to Israel in 1970. She said when they came to Shiloh the hills were covered with wildflowers because “nobody had ever walked here, nobody had cultivated it, nobody owned it…”

“…Medad denied her Arab neighbors had history in the area and said she rarely thinks about them.”

In the story immediately preceding that claim a vastly different portrait of Batya’s World emerged:

Behind Medad stood about 30 trailers for new residents waiting for homes, followed by rows of greenhouses. Shiloh and its neighbors are surrounded by security roads lined with surveillance cameras, concertina wire and guard dogs every 30 meters (100 feet) to keep Palestinians away and prevent attacks…

…Shiloh was the first settlement in the Qariout [Karyut] area, founded in 1979. Since then two other settlements have sprung up nearby, along with six smaller wildcat outposts, which are illegal under Israeli law but get electricity, water and protection from the government.

Together, they surround the village on three sides and deny it access to about two-thirds of its land, according to Yesh Din, an Israeli rights groups that tracks settlements.

Dror Etkes, of Yesh Din, said the Israeli government has officially allocated 28 percent of the village’s original 840 hectares (2,100 acres) to nearby settlements.

Another 35 to 40 percent of the village’s land has been taken unofficially by settlers or the Israeli army, he said.

Sometimes, settlers fence off or cultivate plots, chasing off Palestinians who try to reach them, he said…

…Mohammed Muqbil, a farmer born in Qariout in 1939, said he has lost two of his three plots to settlements. The army confiscated one in 1982 and settlers now grow grapes on it. Settlers chased him from another in 2003, then planted olive trees, he said.

His remaining plot, near the Shvut Rachel settlement, has been a battleground since 2000. Settlers have plowed up his wheat, harvested his olives, prevented him from working and even beat him up, he said. In 2007, a settler uprooted his 300 trees with a bulldozer, he said.

His father farmed the plots before Muqbil was born, and Muqbil said he has documents from Israel and Jordan, ruler of the West Bank until 1967, proving his ownership.

He also keeps an inch-thick stack of Israeli police reports he filed after each incident — all to no avail, he said…

…The Bible gives Jews the right to live in Shiloh, [Batya Medad] said.

“In most of the Western world, when you swear on the Bible, you are swearing that Shiloh is Jewish,” [Batya Medad] said.

Which of course, was describing in 2009 an ongoing international crime, with Batya Medad pictured in the foreground in front of physical proof. To “protect” itself, this loving peaceful group of peaceniks needs to live in an armed camp with guard dogs strung out on the wire every hundred feet, and doing this completely outside of the rule of law because all of the colonies insofar as they are on the other side of the Green Line are illegal, lock stock and bagel; instead she claims that a religious text is her deed. And with all of that, the Palestinians, “she rarely thinks about them.” And yet, the illegal Shvut Rachel colony is literally only a few thousand feet away. She missed the bulldozers committing a horrible human rights crime, destroying 300 olive trees on Mohammed Muqbil’s land just a few thousand feet away.

Batya Medad and her husband moved to Shiloh in 1981, and there’s reason to believe that they are at least heavily emotionally invested in the illegal colony, judging by her writing, and because this colony only has about 3500 squatters in it with a little over 8700 in the entire Shiloh Settlement Corridor, so it is likely that everyone knows everyone else, common in communities of this size and perhaps even more so when you are living in an armed camp with dogs every hundred feet.

Shiloh was founded in the early 1970s when the settlers wanted to spread northwards. Several attempts to settle around the Palestinian city of Nablus had been foiled by the army and a more sophisticated approach was required. It came in the form of Ira Rappaport, an extremist even by the standards of the early settlers. After gaining permission from the government to set up an archaeological dig in Shiloh, he quietly started building a settlement.

Rappaport was a key member of a terrorist group called the Jewish Underground. In 1985, he was found guilty of planting a car bomb in Nablus that blew the legs off two Palestinian officials, Bassam Shakaa and Karim Khalaf. In a ruling that outraged many in Israel, the judge found him not guilty of attempted murder and convicted him on the charge of causing grievous bodily harm. He was sentenced to less than a year in prison and on his release was appointed leader of the Shiloh community.

Rappaport’s daughter Moryah Shapira says on camera in the Telegraph documentary that the Tel Shiloh dig was a ruse to build the illegal colony, which others knew would be problematic, “we’re not coming to live, we’re just coming to dig the archeological site.” Batya Medad came to this town of a few thousand people with her husband in 1981. She teaches English at a Yeshiva High School in Beit El, it’s very right-wing Revisionist Zionist, and it’s the founding well-spring for Arutz Sheva aka Israel National News, or as I fondly know it, settler radio.

Beit El is another illegal colony south of Shiloh almost to Ramallah. Nearly a year ago eighteen month-old Ali Saad Dawabsha was burned to death in Duma when “Jewish extremists [with] nationalist motives” committed a cowardly arson attack against this innocent family at 2 o’clock in the morning. The attack was said to be motivated by demolitions of illegal structures in Beit El the illegal colony where Batya Medad teaches English:

Eighteen-month-old Ali Saad Dawabsha burned to death, while his father and mother, Saad and Reham Dawabsha, and another son, Ahmad, 4, were taken to a hospital in critical condition.

Graffiti saying “revenge” and “long live the messiah” and “price tag” was found on the home…

Two settlers wearing black balaclavas allegedly entered Duma through a nearby gate, smashed a window and threw a molotov cocktail into Reham and Saad’s bedroom while they were asleep just after 2am on Friday morning…

The attack appeared to be an act of revenge for the recent demolition of two buildings in the nearby settlement Beit El, where settlers and Israeli police clashed on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Duma is about three miles to the east from Shiloh, and Shvut Rachel colony, even more rabidly Revisionist Zionist than Shiloh, is between them, even closer to Duma. But for Batya and the Palestinians, “she rarely thinks about them.”

Batya Medad is more than a passive participant in the illegal colonization of the land of Jalud about a mile to the northeast of Shiloh colony, she leads the cheers for these crimes in media sources such as Jerusalem Post. Kamal Farhan Abbad has watched how this has all unfolded over the years as his land was stolen from him with Batya Medad just a few thousand feet away. From a report by Silvia Boarini for the Middle East Eye:

He can remember a time when Jalud was a thriving village, when farmers would come and go from the land and when he could travel to the market in Nablus and stay away a whole day without wondering whether his family was safe.

But as he puffs on his cigarette, he can also recall the day when all that changed. It began with an excavator. ‘They came to open a road on the land over there,’ he told Middle East Eye, remembering the year, around 1991, when workers began to establish Shvut Rachel, the outpost nearest to his home. ‘I went to have a look and the Israeli officials told me not to worry, that I wouldn’t be affected.’

But only a few months later a bulldozer came back to destroy an old stone construction that Abbad had used to store his tools and sometimes keep his livestock. ‘Then a caravan with the first settlers arrived,’ he explained. ‘And soon after, another one.’

…Bashar Qaryuti, from the village of Qaryut next to Jalud, is spokesperson for the local committee against settlements. At 33, he has never known a West Bank without settlers and says he knows all too well what is behind the legalisation spree.

“Israel is trying to connect a total of 14 settlements in the north of the West Bank by legalising all the outposts in between,” he explained. “From the West, all the way to the Jordan Valley.”

This would create Jewish continuity and at the same time split countless Palestinian communities, lowering the chances of ever recovering territory for any viable future Palestinian state.

Just like Jalud, Qaryut too has lost some 3,750 acres to settlements, some of which to Shvut Rachel and Shilo. As the space for Palestinian villages shrinks and de-development runs its course, the nearby settlements seem to taunt them with their new homes, roads and archaeological parks.

‘We recently found out that a new outpost is planned on our land, Ma’al Katorek,’ Qaryuti said. ‘They want to build it opposite Shilo to cut us off completely from the main road.’ The new outpost is planned despite there being already a number of pending eviction orders on existing settler units, Qaryuti explained.

‘There is a court order for the dismantling of Ayuval outpost but it has not been implemented; there is one for Adei Ad but it’s also not been implemented.’ The irony is, Qaryuti joked, that when a demolition order is issued for a Palestinian house it is implemented instantly.

Both Qaryuti and Abbad complain that their human rights do not stand much of a chance against the settlers. Palestinians can’t even enjoy the support of the Palestinian Authority (PA), which has no jurisdiction in Area C. Israeli settlers, they say, have a whole state behind them. [Emphasis mine.]

Shiloh is a special case for the United Nation’s as well. It is part of a case study from a report made for the General Assembly entitled “Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,
including East Jerusalem, and the occupied Syrian Golan” [A/70/351]. in section IV. “Settlements as a driver of violations of international human rights and humanitarian law and an obstacle to peace” in section C. Case study: settlement corridor in the northern West Bank around Shiloh settlement and Qaryut:

Shiloh settlement corridor, consisting of four settlements (Shiloh, Rechelim, Ma’ale Levona and Eli) and some 14 outposts, with a total estimated population of 8,747,76 has been established and grown through a combination of measures, which typify modalities of informal settlement expansion documented throughout the West Bank. Largely based on restricting or discouraging Palestinian movement and access, these practices lead to the de facto appropriation of land by settler groups.77 In the corridor, informal measures primarily implemented by settlers in the area, include the erection of unauthorized residential outposts, illegal takeover and cultivation of Palestinian farmland, and the establishment of archaeological excavation and touristic sites. Such practices facilitate the exertion of control over lands that are often well beyond the built-up areas or even the outer security perimeter of the settlements. In the area around Qaryut in particular, these settlement expansion tactics have frequently been enabled by acts of violence and intimidation targeting Palestinian residents of the area.

55. Illegal activity originating from the Shiloh settlement corridor is facilitated by both passive and proactive measures by Israeli authorities. These range from the absence of law enforcement towards settlers — for criminal as well as civil offences including unauthorized construction — to steps taken by the Israel Defense Forces towards the formalization and implementation of movement and access restrictions. In addition, the Israeli authorities have allocated land and resources for the erection of unauthorized outposts, and have been engaged in their retroactive formalization. Finally, large-scale public investment in tourism sites managed by settlers is further cementing the presence and expansion of settler-controlled lands in this area.

Settler violence and restrictions on access to land and resources

56. Settler violence and other criminal offences committed by Israeli civilians in the area against Palestinian residents have been met with a near absence of law enforcement by the Israeli authorities. Of a sample of 116 police investigations into alleged settler offences monitored by Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din from 2005 to 2015 in the Shiloh settlement corridor, 95 per cent ended without prosecutions…

I believe that the manifesting evil that is the illegal colonies, and the attendant lesser evils that underpin this criminal enterprise, is not the fault of the Jewish people as Batya Medad and those of her crazy ideological bent would have the world believe. Saying things like, “In most of the Western world, when you swear on the Bible, you are swearing that Shiloh is Jewish,” is clearly unhinged.

Occupation graph 2016-05-13.

In short, I believe that Batya Medad and the entire immoral illegal premise of the illegal colonies in Palestine, which have been there for seventy-two percent of Israel’s existence is doing incalculable damage to Judaism in particular and diaspora Jews in general.

I believe that her and others like her are exhibiting auto-anti-semitism as she believes, apparently fervently, that [Israeli settler] Jews are superior to all other human beings, “…here in Israel we need a government that recognizes that we are not like other countries, nor other nations, nor other religions.” [Ibid] And perhaps above all law.

I believe that these people one day will be held responsible for shaking the very legitimacy of the state of Israel within its own borders, maybe irreparably, and as there is now a cacophony of evidence documenting the criminality of the illegal colonists, giving any of them an international platform to spew hate and deny an entire people existence even as she is actively working to ethnic cleanse the last few Palestinians from her adopted home of Shiloh, in Palestine, I believe rises to the level needed for action under the Rome Statute for active incitement to genocide through the media.

It’s not just words. Batya Medad has been deeply embedded with these illegal colonies deep with Palestine for decades. She represents as a volunteer tour guide for Shiloh quite faithfully and happily the illegal colonial Apartheid that has supplanted and in my view destroyed the Two State Solution(tm) forever.

Giving her a media voice to encourage more international crimes and human rights abuses while actively living in the midst of it and denying that Palestinians even exist is an abomination and a crime, and I believe that Jerusalem Post and any of the others that fancy themselves as mainstream media should remove her from their roster of bloggers as simply too extreme to be involved with; identify them as part of the problem. One does not have to be an active participant in genocide, and the genocide need not have happened to be charged and convicted of inciting genocide through the media.

I believe this concerted effort on the part of the right wing to use bogus Hasbara propaganda to promote crimes against humanity using the media should always be illegal and brought to an end as a matter of the rule of law and justice, not just for Islamic State, but also even when it is the Jewish State of Israel.

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I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet.

"His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.

"A census of Palestine conducted by the Mandatory government on 23 October 1922. Population figures in the census featured a breakdown by district of residence, religion, language and age.

The total population of Palestine was given as 757,182, of whom 590,890 (78%) were Muslims (“Mohammedans”), 83,794 (11%) Jews, 73,024 (9%) Christians and 9,474 others. The population of Jerusalem was given as 62,578, of whom 13,413 were Muslims, 33,971 Jews, 14,699 Christians and 495 others." From the report:

"In accordance with the provisions of the Proclamation of 1st September 1922, published in the Official Gazette of the same date, a census of Palestine was held on the night of the twenty-second -- twenty-third of October, 1922."

"(1) To those colonies and territories which as a consequence of the late war have ceased to be under the sovereignty of the States which formerly governed them and which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world, there should be applied the principle that the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilisation and that securities for the performance of this trust should be embodied in this Covenant...

(4) Certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire have reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognized subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they are able to stand alone. The wishes of these communities must be a principal consideration in the selection of the Mandatory..."

-- Avalon Project at Yale Law School, "The Covenant of the League of Nations, Including Amendments adopted to December, 1924, June 28th, 1919," Lillian Goldman Law Library. (accessed December 2nd, 2016).